March/April 2025
Pecan recovery: Lessons from Hurricane Helene
The high winds and water Hurricane Helene brought to Georgia are showing pecan growers some insights into how to prepare for and endure devastating storms.
Only 13 months after another storm, Hurricane Idalia, struck the region, Helene’s Category 2 and 3 winds caused massive destruction to Georgia’s pecan orchards.
Buck Paulk of Shiloh Pecan Farms and Shiloh Pecan Farms Nursery grows on 4,100 acres in Ray City, Georgia. In September 2024, Helene’s 140 mile-per-hour winds blew through his orchards northeast of Valdosta, Georgia. Paulk lost 37% of his crop, or 25,000 pecan trees, to hurricanes Idalia and Helene.
“It’s terrible. It’s your nightmare,” Paulk said. “I’ve never had one that bad. It’s expensive. It’s disheartening.”
While Paulk isn’t sure why, he said he noticed Hurricane Idalia damaged a greater percentage of trees 15 years and younger compared to Hurricane Helene, which saw higher tree loss in the trees older than 15 years.
Tree trimming help
Changes following the hurricanes include more growers hedging their pecan trees to stop growing tree tops as quickly as normal, as well not pushing their young trees to grow faster.
Instead of pushing more fertilizer and water on the new trees, over the next four to five years growers should make fewer fertilizer applications and water less frequently so their trees can develop better root systems, said Andrew Sawyer, southeast area pecan agent with University of Georgia Pecan Extension, who inspected groves after the storm.
Hedging, a relatively new practice for Southeast pecan growers, helped some trees survive the recent hurricanes. Hedged orchards saw a survival rate 60% better than non-hedged trees, Sawyer said. At the same time, however, some of the worst-damaged orchards Sawyer saw were hedged.
“When you have winds over 90 miles an hour coupled with some places that had 8 inches of rain before the hurricane even sat here, with that kind of wind and rain, it doesn’t matter if the trees were hedged or not,” he said.
Paulk said he believes hedging helped protect trees. While some of his younger orchards hadn’t entered into hedging sustained damage, without hedging, tree loss and limb structure damage would have been worse on his older trees, he said.
Sawyer said hedging helps reduce alternation when nut orchards produce a crop one year but not as much the following year, producing smaller carbohydrate reserves for the following year’s crop. After a hurricane cuts many fruiting branches, an oversized crop could occur. However, nut quality declines because a tree isn’t able to produce quality nuts with multiple nuts.
“We want to have a little bit of crop every year,” Sawyer said. “You will always have an up and down, but you want to lessen that up and down.”
Alternation may not negatively affect the crop, he said. Some growers will fruit-thin their trees, shaking nuts off in July.
“You also get a lot more time-saving with hedging, because you’re accomplishing so much more for the tree,” Sawyer said. “It makes your nut quality a better percentage kernel. It does not give you a better yield, but it does make it easier for the tree to control scab. The tree can definitely utilize less water when it’s hedged.”
Saturated soil cannot hold roots. As Helene quickly stormed through the region, Paulk didn’t think rains damaged his orchard soil any more than other more typical rainstorms. Adjoining forests and wind breaks could factor into damage. When wind moves into tunnels or lower-lying areas that feed into larger fields, it acts like drains.
“When you apply a hundred-mile-an-hour wind to a ground force, you really can think of the wind acting like the way the water runs,” Paulk said. “You’ll find certain locations are worse than others.”
While growers can learn some practices, including encouraging better root sets by slowing new orchard tree growth and reducing irrigation, such practices might lessen vulnerability by a fraction, Paulk said.
“You can try to adjust and deal with it when it comes, but there’s not a lot of things you can do to prevent it,” Paulk said. “My mindset has always been that I will lose some trees.”
